The End of an Era

Tony Benn

Benn's diaries now encompass five or six volumes, covering the period 1940 to 1990 (I understand a further volume from 1990 to the present day is in the pipeline, so clearly the man is still at it).

I've dipped into some of the earlier volumes, dealing principally with his time as a minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments but a lot of that stuff can seem rather dry and dusty (what the heck is an Incomes Policy anyway?) if you're of my generation. More interesting, if you grew up in the 1980s like me, is this latest volume covering the Thatcher years, the Falklands, the Miner's Strike and Wapping, the Gulf War and much more. Lost years, years of defeat and disarray for the Labour Party and for Benn.

It also covers the period of Tony Benn's steepest decline in political importance. At the start of the 1980s Benn was still a giant of the Labour party scene, leadership candidate and potential PM. I can remember for my parents he was a terrible bogeyman. But in the course of the 1980s the Labour party was driven into the political wilderness and Benn himself lost his Bristol seat. He quickly returned to Westminster as MP for Chesterfield but ended the decade and this volume a marginal figure and an embarrassment to his party.

One of the sure signs that his time has long gone is that an Internet search on his name returns surprisingly few results. Not a single one of his many books is reviewed at the UK Amazon and amazingly The End of an Era isn't even listed at Amazon, undoubtedly the most significant work I've ever found to absent from their mammoth database.

He is an excellent diarist. Honest, endearing and usually full of good cheer. The End of an Era makes an excellent document for anyone interested in the decline of socialism and the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Benn is almost too honest. The overall effect you come away with after 628 pages is of the utter folly of the author and the rest of the Left. So much hot air, so many policy reviews, internal squabbling, so many drafts, amendments, manifestos and pamphlets. There are hundreds of entries like this one for 21st September 1982.

"The NEC today voted by 22 to 3 to adopt a resolution by Denis Healey, amended by me, on the Lebanon ... A major devolpment of Labour party policy."

This is just months before a general election in which the Labour Party will crash to another defeat at Mrs Thatcher's hands. In fact it'll be another 14 years before a Labour government can do anything about anything, let alone the Lebanon.

And it's easy to see how the Labour party and its mainstream grew first weary, then sick of Benn's analysis. Benn's attacks on successive Labour leaders, Foot and then Kinnock are scathing whenever there is any attempt to steer the Labour party towards any kind of electoral credibility. Kinnock called Benn's position the "purity of powerlessness". Goodness only knows what Benn thinks of Tony Blair today.

Benn is strongest on the issues he is still strong on today, asking important constitutional questions about the role of the monarchy, the civil service and the media. He is very strong on the principles of democracy and freedom and openness in government and his views alway bring freshness to any debate. You don't have to agree with him to still feel pleased that at least someone is consistantly poking the establishment with a stick.

And he's shrewd on Thatcher, even in the early days. He quickly identifies her as a formidable foe. There is also some admiration for her methods. In the 1980s she was doing the things he would like to have done in government himself, steamrollering the civil service and other pockets of resistance and inertia in the interests of implementing a political programme.

I can't help comparing his diaries to Alan Clark's. They are not quite as fine a read as Alan Clark's diaries because they lack Clark's casual charm. Clark also managed to make himself sound like he was in politics by accident whereas Benn's pages ooze with the slightly charmless earnestness of the True Believer. Did Clark believe in anything anyway? But Benn is undoubtedly the finer man, the more important historical figure and (for all Clark's confessional tone) the more honest diarist.